Lustre Enhances Flexibility for Big Data Era

By Scott Jones, ORNL

September 13, 2017

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Intel Corporation have wrapped up a three year project aimed at giving users of Lustre, the Department of Energy’s preferred parallel file system, more flexibility. And the results are impressive.

Lustre is the preferred file system for the leadership scientific computing community for a simple reason: it has an unprecedented ability to store and retrieve the large-scale data inherent in complex scientific simulations such as those run at ORNL’s Leadership Computing Facility, home to Titan, the nation’s most powerful system for open science.

In the era of big data, however, there is no such thing as too much flexibility, and to bridge the gap between high-performance computing and today’s massive datasets, the ORNL/Intel team sought to modify the underlying Lustre code so that DOE’s trademark file system could better accommodate the data analytics workloads playing an increasingly important role in scientific discovery.

Their solution: Progressive File Layout (PFL), a novel storage scheme that absolves Lustre users of the responsibility of striping, or the method by which data is divided and stored across servers. The PFL approach gives users more opportunities to take advantage of Lustre’s highly scalable input/output performance, especially for big data-type workloads, and evolves Lustre to more easily facilitate large-scale datasets.

Specifically, PFL allows files to be striped dynamically depending on their size, at which point another striping scheme is implemented as the file size grows, and so on as the files surpass various size thresholds. “The scheme manages capacity based on layout and removes a significant responsibility from users,” said OLCF File Systems Team Lead Sarp Oral.

PFL is particularly relevant in the age of big data, as analytic and machine learning algorithms are increasingly read-heavy; i.e., they repeatedly read the same datasets, a process that creates “hot spots” in the form of requests repeatedly hitting the same resource. PFL paves the way for future Lustre enhancements to spread these requests out by creating replicas for the multiple requests, a process known as “file level replication,” therefore eliminating hot spots and improving the overall application I/O performance.

It’s a powerful modification—by giving users better flexibility on how to lay out their files, they can by extension take better advantage of Lustre’s unique capabilities without becoming parallel file system experts. And while Lustre has historically looked to underlying storage hardware for reliability, PFL also enables future developments aimed at providing reliability within the file system itself, allowing for the development of more scalable, efficient Lustre systems in less time with less money.

“While PFL is valuable on its own, it also enables future technology development by allowing Lustre to become an enterprise file system, expanding its use cases and marketability,” said Oral.

Large-scale testing of PFL was performed on Titan in June and was “very successful, with the new code showing significant improvement in file I/O performance,” said Neena Imam, deputy director of Collaborations for ORNL’s Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate. She added that despite its relative youth, “a stable PFL version is now available as of Lustre version 2.10 and has received significant attention in the Lustre community, which will benefit greatly from this addition.”

PFL is the result of a three year effort in which ORNL co-defined the architecture with Intel, oversaw the development efforts, and performed extensive testing.

Seeking to reign in the tediousness of manual software testing, Pfizer HPC Engineer Shahzeb Siddiqui is developing an open source software tool called buildtest, aimed at automating software stack testing by providing the community with a central repository of tests for common HPC apps and the ability to automate execution of testing. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

In just a few months time, Senegal will be operating the second largest HPC system in sub-Saharan Africa. The Minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation Mary Teuw Niane made the announcement on Monday (Jan. 14 Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

If it's Nvidia GPUs you're after to power your AI/HPC/visualization workload, Google Cloud has them, now claiming "broadest GPU availability." Each of the three big public cloud vendors has by turn touted the latest and Read more…

Previous:

STAC (Securities Technology Analysis Center) recently released an ‘exploratory’ benchmark for machine learning which it hopes will evolve into a firm benchmark or suite of benchmarking tools to compare the performanc Read more…

By James Reinders

Quantum computing has lived so long in the future it’s taken on a futuristic life of its own, with a Gartner-style hype cycle that includes triggers of innovation, inflated expectations and – though a useful quantum system is still years away – anticipatory troughs of disillusionment. Read more…

By John Russell

Anyone who has checked a forecast to decide whether or not to pack an umbrella knows that weather prediction can be a mercurial endeavor. It is a Herculean task: the constant modeling of incredibly complex systems to a high degree of accuracy at a local level within very short spans of time. Read more…

By John Russell

Cray revealed today the details of its next-gen supercomputing architecture, Shasta, selected to be the next flagship system at NERSC. We've known of the code-name "Shasta" since the Argonne slice of the CORAL project was announced in 2015 and although the details of that plan have changed considerably, Cray didn't slow down its timeline for Shasta. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

It’s been a good two weeks, AMD’s Gary Silcott and Andy Parma told me on the last day of SC18 in Dallas at the restaurant where we met to discuss their show news and recent successes. Heck, it’s been a good year. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

For nearly two hours on Monday at SC18, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, presented his expansive view of the future of HPC (and computing in general) as only he can do. Animated. Backstopped by a stream of data charts, product photos, and even a beautiful image of supernovae... Read more…

By John Russell

Riding healthy U.S. and global economies, strong demand for AI-capable hardware and other tailwind trends, the high performance computing server market jumped 28 percent in the second quarter 2018 to $3.7 billion, up from $2.9 billion for the same period last year, according to industry analyst firm Hyperion Research. Read more…

By John Russell

As part of the run-up to SC18, taking place in Dallas next week (Nov. 11-16), Intel is doling out info on its next-gen Cascade Lake family of Xeon processors, specifically the “Advanced Processor” version (Cascade Lake-AP), architected for high-performance computing, artificial intelligence and infrastructure-as-a-service workloads. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

Networking equipment powerhouse Mellanox could be an acquisition target by Microsoft, according to a published report in an Israeli financial publication. Microsoft has reportedly gone so far as to engage Goldman Sachs to handle negotiations with Mellanox. Read more…